apple, granola bars, Walkman, toiletries case. This he unzipped and emptied— toothbrush, deodorant, nail clipper, beard trimmer—all of it looking remarkably mundane. I think that bothered me the most. Nothing interesting here, let alone drugs or contraband. He asked me to empty my pockets. I did. Change, comb, mints. I would be patted down next, I supposed, money belt removed, letter extracted.
But now the kid turned his attention to my books. He placed the four paperbacks side by side on the table, a Spanish-English dictionary (new), The Red Badge of Courage, a copy of Walden and the Final Harvest edition of Emily Dickinson (all old). After flipping through each, he picked up the novel and brought it over to the other men.
“But why?” I protested. They ignored me. Cover half off, the book was passed from hand to hand among the three of them.
Now Crane, the empty pipe hanging from his mouth, stirred his bulk and walked forward. “Dispense uds, señores,” he said. There was a moment of exchange, a question and an answer. The book along with every other item was replaced methodically in the bag and I was signaled to go.
“What the heck was that all about?” I asked, as we passed into the lobby.
“Just an aberration,” he said. “They don’t usually do it to U.S. tourists.”
“Oh, that’s comforting.”
“The kid’s a trainee, I think. Just showing off.”
I glanced about for a men’s room, saw a sign and headed there. He was waiting when I came out. We walked together toward the exit.
“What did you say to them, anyway?” I asked. “That you’re related to the author?”
He guffawed, unoffended. “Lordy, no! I had a hunch the fellow got hung up on the word red, and indeed, that was the case.”
It took a couple of seconds for that knot to untangle. Subversive literature? “What bloody nonsense!” I said.
“Oh, indeedy-dee. Ludicrous. But ludicry, if I may coin a word, is often the name of the game around here.”
The doors to the exterior, just yards away now, beckoned with wafts of cool air as they opened and closed. Out on the sidewalk the breeze mixed with the exhaust of a fleet of taxis double-parked at the curb. Cabbies whistled and yelled. I turned to Crane to say goodbye. He looked rumpled and tired, his shirt half out. “I appreciate whatever you did,” I told him.
“Don’t mention it, old chap,” he said. Thunder sounded faintly. “Rainy season,” he announced.
A taxi pulled into a space in front of us, the rusted hulk of an old Ford Crown Vic. “Zona Uno?” called the driver, getting out of the car and opening the trunk. He wore a Mets cap.
“Are you going downtown?” Crane asked me.
I opened the back door without answering. Four people instantly pushed past me into the cab, two in front and two in back. With a squeeze there was room for one more.
“Take it,” I said to Crane. “Are you going that way?”
“Yes, to the Centenario.” He surveyed the seat skeptically. The cabbie barked something, slamming down the trunk. “It’s yours,” said Crane.
I got in, both bags on my lap, and reached my hand through the window. He shook it, palming a business card. “Centenario,” he repeated. “I’ll be there most of the month. Call me if you need another salvamento.”
What?
“Deus ex machina.”
Oh. A joke? “Sure,” I said. I had no intention of ever seeing him again. Then the vehicle was off with a roar, plowing a path through the wet evening haze. In a few minutes we were on a main artery. All the way to the hotel, I watched for landmarks that might have meaning for me, but nothing did—an enormous statue of somebody, a viaduct, wave after wave of plump graffiti. No leaps of sensory memory. On the dark horizon ahead an urban glow edged the sky. Soon buildings closed in on either side, neon lights flashed, and we were locked in a preposterous horn-blaring traffic jam. By the time we reached the hotel, it was raining hard.
TWO
For a long time as a kid I used to think I could make my father reappear. If I got the equation just right, the right location or the right minute, the right thing to tell or ask him, a door would suddenly open and he would be there, looking just as I remembered him. I hadn’t engaged in that fantasy for a long time, and I would never have admitted that I chose the Pan American Hotel with that intention, but it did happen to be the last place I’d seen him in happy circumstances.
He had brought me to the Capital on my seventh birthday for a gift of priority time, just the two of us. The hotel was meant as part of the treat, but the gentility of it, with its glossy terrazzo floors and bowing staff, only befuddled me. I liked things better outdoors. We poked our way through the intersecting streets and avenues, calles and avenidas, now efficiently numbered, but once with strange names, Street of Solitude, Street of Sorrows.
My father kept asking me what I would like to do most. All I wanted was to be in his presence, if I’d known how to tell him that. He had been away from home a lot in the previous months. I didn’t care what we did, but buy bubble gum was what I finally said, and off we went on the quest. We found it in the underground Central Market, literally under the ground. I studied the word on the colored wrapper: Dubble Bubble. Was that Spanish or English, I wondered, or both, like Chiclets.
We sat on a bench in the public plaza fronting the wide National Palace, while he taught me how to blow bubbles. He had grown a droopy mustache in the time since I’d seen him last, and for the rest of the day it held specks of pink. The mustache was gray, and it made him look older, though his hair was still blond. There was something else. His stature had somehow diminished. He was tall, a towering person, and his clothes had always seemed a little too small for him. Now they looked too big and they were the same clothes I’d seen him in hundreds of times.
“What are you staring at, raggmunk?” he asked. That was his Swedish name for me. It meant “potato pancake.” In Spanish I was apt to be an elote, an ear of corn.
“That dumb mustache,” I answered, and then we arm-wrestled, there on a bench in the sunny plaza. He won, of course. He had big hands. Both of mine could have fit into one of his. I never thought he threw a match just to make me feel good, though he hammed up the process, and this time he went into full-bodied contortions that collapsed me in laughter.
That was at the end of January in 1954. This August evening, thirty-three years later, and I now older than he was at the time, the memory surprised me with what it brought to the surface. Maybe I wasn’t ready after all. Maybe never.
After registering, I went directly to my room on the second floor. A long night’s sleep was what I thought I needed, but the traffic outside my windows was so clamorous I gave that up. I went down to the dining room for a glass of scotch and was informed apologetically by the waiter that there was no scotch, nor any other alcoholic drink, because the hotel owner was a teetotaler himself—“a follower of Riosmont.” That’s how I heard it, as one word. It sounded like the name of a cult.
“What’s that?” I asked.
He spelled it, politely. “M-o-n-t-t. General Efraín Ríos Montt. Vos?”
“Oh,
